


Two Candles Burning

by Elleth



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Gen, Odense University Hospital, The Serum, Year 0 (Stand Still Stay Silent), secret santa gift
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-26
Updated: 2017-12-26
Packaged: 2019-02-22 01:42:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13156491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elleth/pseuds/Elleth
Summary: While the lights go out in Odense, the researchers and military holed up in the hospital in search for a cure for the Rash try to hold on to hope.





	Two Candles Burning

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2017 Forum Secret Santa for Grey-cat. If you'd like to listen to the Year 0 playlist I had running for most of the writing, click [here](https://playmoss.com/en/elleth/playlist/name). The characters aren't strictly original, but show up briefly in the [OUH flashback](http://www.sssscomic.com/comic.php?page=618), with Jette Janssen at the end of the table, Poulsen the bald old guy who's already given up on hope, and Andersen the one who takes the failed serum to the manufacturing lab.

Doctor Søren Juel, one of the senior pathologists, had decided to live up to his last name, and brought spruce trimmings from somewhere in the Odense University Hospital perimeter before hiding in his lab again. One of the hotel staff that held out with them had dug out a box of thick white candles. It wasn't much, and the Advent Wreath that Jette Janssen had put together dangled from the dark overhead lights in the conference room ceiling by a roll of bandages and strips of red cloth napkins tied into bows, rather than proper ribbons. 

She glanced up, massaged the bridge of her nose, and grimaced. It was better than nothing at all. The world might be ending, but if Odense University Hospital was going to be the last holdout of life and civilization in Denmark, perhaps the entire world, she'd see it to the end.

Not long until that either way now. Christmas was perhaps two weeks away, so she had lit two candles. In any ordinary year Odense would be awash in fairy lights and Christmas decorations like a starry sky spreading gently over the city, rather than the shapeless mass of buildings that stretched beyond her sight in the early dark. The pinpricks of light out there - people hanging on, similarly by candlelight after the electricity had gone out in the city - had gotten fewer and fewer until barely anything remained, and she'd stopped looking for those lights. She wondered if anybody still looked to the hospital, a bastion that kept a tight rein on the disease - or tried to. Even their generators had started stuttering after a fuel run had not come back from the city, so now the power was restricted to laboratories and manufacturing.

The two candle-flames flickered in a draft of air, the door to the conference room clicked; she jumped. 

Andersen, military, let himself in and collapsed into his usual chair without a word of greeting or praise for Jette's work. She was trying to decide whether she had the energy to bristle at that when he said, "They're rolling out the… _cure_." From his mouth it sounded rather more like 'plague', or 'murder'. 

He wasn't wrong. 

Jette hadn't expected it to work from the beginning, and said so in their last meeting with the military, but hearing it finalized, she swallowed hard. Outside, the sound of a helicopter rose to a scream in the silence of the city, and even through the glass she could hear the answering _scree_ -ing of the creatures that prowled outside the walls. The helicopter's red and green position lights flashed as it veered around the glass facade of the patient hotel they were holed up in, unexpectedly festive even though it was carrying the death of hope on board as it diminished eastward like a shooting star whizzing across the city. 

Jette knew that Copenhagen was the first destination for the delivery, and almost laughed. Only a few days ago she'd let one the younger lab techs - Louise, a sweet girl with a plump face who excelled at her job but was almost unbearably naive outside the medical sciences - catch her up in nattering about the royal speech and how Queen Margrethe would thank them, possibly by name, for saving the world. 

They were making progress on the improved serum, she'd said, manufacturing enough to stock the hospital at least: Jette herself knew that the patients undergoing the new treatment hung on, the readings were better and brain function stayed stable, enough to not give up if time and caretakers could be found to not let the test subjects die of neglect. They might still die, but it was by no means certain.

But she didn't let herself hope, and rightly so. Andersen and senior officer Poulsen had rejected her proposal for more time and personnel as unrealistic and a lost cause. Louise had come down with the Rash a day ago, unsure how. Queen Margrethe, if she was still alive in the first place, wouldn't be much longer. There'd be no speech.

"Well," Jette said, not sure whom she was answering, her own detached thoughts or Andersen's actual words. "We never expected it to work, did we?" 

The man was staring at her. Jette looked up to meet Andersen's eye. "Thanks to you, I'm running a trial," he said out of the blue. "Poulsen doesn't know, and I expect you to stay silent about this, or I'll have you taken out and shot." For a moment his face - young for such a high rank (she thought the outbreak must have slingshotted him where he was now) - hardened into someone she was sure the man didn't want to be. 

She shrugged, too tired to care very much, and his threat had too few teeth - or various other mutations she'd recently seen - to even scare her. "Tell me more." 

"I do not want to give up like the old goat did. I had to shoot down your proposal or waste my chance, but - " He glanced over his shoulder at the door as if he might have summoned Poulsen by oblique mention alone, and there was a flicker of guilt in his expression. If Jette had any children, he might the age a son of hers could be; hell, he couldn't be older than what, thirty? 

"- that was only pretense. So I included the new serum in the shipment. A live trial, if you so will. They'll die either way if it doesn't work. Amalienborg and Christiansborg will get the new version, you get what I'm saying - not Kastellet."

Jette nodded, understanding. "Important people, by some narrow-minded definition; politicians and royalty. And a coup against Kastellet to end the program. I am assuming you have not told them that their cure kills." 

"No." Andersen avoided meeting her eye this time, looking up at the two lit candles in the wreath dribbling hot wax onto the polished table. 

Jette cleared her throat. "You're the one who has to live with it. I am not responsible for that, although if I've seen it through I would not mind getting into my car and going home, so you have my thanks." 

"Where is that? Home?" He seized on the distraction eagerly.

"Ah - Horsens. My older sister is a pastor there. Last I knew she was helping in a Catholic church, one of the public care centers, not her own. I think she'll still be there; I'd know if she weren't. I've been dreaming about having coffee and cake with her lately." She allowed herself a private smile at the memory of Agnes' Christmas cookies melting with cinnamon and cardamom on her tongue. Sometimes the taste carried on into waking. 

"Minds are funny like that - escapism," said Andersen. "You know, Doctor Janssen - why don't you pack your things. I'm not comfortable letting you drive, though no doubt the roads will be free - but the helicopter will be back by morning, and if there is hope of finding survivors, that is a justified attempt to make. I may have a gift ready by then, for you and your sister, and her patients. It sounds like she may be... important." 

Jette inclined her head. She understood. 

"Merry Christmas, Andersen," she replied, and rose to begin packing. She left the candles burning, and Andersen, sitting in the half-light, watching them.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Kiraly for the beta! ♥


End file.
